Literary Gate Keepers
This actually came out in last week’s Time Out New York, but Michael Miller’s piece on how a book goes from writer to reader is pretty interesting and touches on some of the knotty issues surrounding publication and publicity. Miller briefly hits on the various gate keepers of book culture: agents, editors, ...
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Translations in the New York Times
We mentioned this a couple weeks back, but this morning, the Literary Saloon has a more factual follow-up to Douglas Kibbee’s claim that translations are on the rise, as evidenced by the increase in coverage for translations in the New York Times Book Review. Michael Orthofer—who both questioned the veracity of this ...
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UK Independent Presses in Publishers Weekly
The most recent issue of Publishers Weekly contains an interesting piece on the state and nature of independent publishing in the UK: “Independents,” for these purposes, are U.K. trade publishers that are not one of the Big Four (Hachette, Random House, HarperCollins and Penguin) or the Not-Quite-So-Big Three (Pan ...
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Borders for Sale
Not necessarily international lit related, but this is pretty big news (from Shelf Awareness: Borders is putting itself up for sale or may sell divisions. It has suspended its dividend. It is borrowing some $42.5 million from the hedge fund that is its largest shareholder. [. . .] [CEO George] Jones added that ...
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Maybe Just a Poor Choice of Words . . .
Not sure how we missed this article by Jane Henderson in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about how “world literature thrives in translation” (especially considering that Three Percent is listed in the “more information” box), but I have to agree with Michael Orthofer —“thriving” is ...
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Early Titlepage.tv Reviews, Um, Not So Good
We announced the first Titlepage.tv episode yesterday and then watched about 15 minutes before leaving it paused on a goofy Charles Bock grimace for the rest of the day. That’s approximately 10 minutes, 33 seconds more than Jessa from Bookslut watched. And Sarah Weinman has a list of ten ways to improve the show, ...
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Interesting What Someone Else's Success Can Do To You
Penguin’s audio plans circa October 22, 2007 (via PW): In other Penguin news, the New York Times reported today that the publisher has pulled out of its deal with eMusic to sell its audio titles through the online music retailer. Penguin Audio publisher Dick Heffernan told the paper that the issue came down to ...
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